"_Fourthly_. The tickling pricks of incontinency are blunted by an eager study; for from thence proceedeth an incredible resolution of the spirits, that oftentimes there do not remain so many behind as may suffice to push and thrust forwards the generative resudation to the places thereto appropriated, and therewithal inflate the cavernous nerve, whose office is to ejaculate the moisture for the propagation of human progeny. Lest you should think it is not so, be pleased but to contemplate a little the form, fashion, and carriage of a man exceeding earnestly set upon some learned meditation and deeply plunged therein, and you shall see how all the arteries of his brains are stretched forth, and bent like the string of a cross-bow, the more promptly, dexterously and copiously to suppeditate, furnish and supply him with store of spirits, sufficient to replenish and fill up the ventricles, seats, tunnels, mansions, receptacles and cellules of common sense--of the imagination apprehension, and fancy--of the ratiocination, arguing, and resolution--as likewise, of the memory, recordation, and remembrance; and with great alacrity, nimbleness, and agility, to run, pass and course from one to the other, through those pipes, windings, and conduits, which to skilful anatomists are perceivable at the end of the wonderful net, where all the arteries close in a terminating point; which arteries taking their rise and origin from the left capsule of the heart, bring, through several circuits, ambages, and anfractuosities, the vital spirits, to subtilize and refine them in the ætherial purity of animal spirits. Nay, in such a studiously meditating, musing person, you may espy so extravagant raptures of one, as it were out of himself, that all his natural faculties for that time will seem to lie suspended from each their proper charge and office, and his exterior senses to be at a stand. In a word, you cannot choose than think, that he is by an extraordinary ecstasy quite transported out of what he was or should be; and that Socrates did not speak improperly when he said, That philosophy was nothing else but a meditation upon death. This possibly is the reason why Democritus[226] deprived himself of the sense of seeing, prizing, at a much lower rate, the loss of his sight, than the diminution of his contemplation which he had frequently found disturbed by the vagrant flying-out strayings of his unsettled and roving eyes.[227] Therefore is it that Pallas, the goddess of wisdom, tutoress and guardianess of such as are diligently studious and painfully industrious, is and hath been still accounted a virgin. The Muses upon the same consideration are esteemed perpetual maids: and the Graces, for the same reason, have been held to continue in a sempiternal pudicity.